Horror-Spot: Shiver RE-Review

Eskalofrio - Shiver

By Jose

Plot:

Santi, a young high-school student with a serious physical reaction to sunlight, is forced by his health to move with his single mother to a shadowy, isolated village in the mountains of Spain where the inhabitants begin to reveal themselves as strangely xenophobic. When terrible, violent events begin to occur, Santi becomes first an outcast at school and then strongly suspected by the police of hideous murders. Santi himself, however, wonders if he is not the next victim.

Any good?:

Oh yes another horror movie review! When I first saw this movie I did not know that it had ties to Pan’s Labyrinth and The Orphanage. Two rather good Spanish supernatural/horror movies. If anyone has seen either one or both of those films they know that Shiver should be something special as well.
Eskalofrio or Shiver I found to be really entertaining as a international horror movie. It is well known that foreign horror movies tend to be much better than American horror. We tend to want fast paced scare after scare or kill after kill. Although I do enjoy some movies like that and some are good movies, it gets tiring and repetitive. Plus we tend to “censor” horror here. I may be confusing some people but if you do watch many foreign horror from Spain, Japan, Italy, etc you would see some really messed up and gruesome things that would disturb you (Martyrs for example).
Shiver does not bring buckets of blood and guts. It brings a sense of dread and uneasiness of what lurks and hides in the dark. And gives you that feeling ten fold when you see that whatever that thing is in the dark invades your home and room, and basically breathes down your neck while you sleep. And no I am not saying that to scare you I am saying that because it happens in the movie.
Santi suffers from a vampire like allergy of sunlight. And due to that, at the beginning, you would think Shiver was a vampire movie. But it is not once Santi and his mom move to the village things seem too good to be true. Live stock disappear, people are attacked, and what the hell lurks in the forest? And once we have a small idea of what it is we get a rather uncomfortable scene of Santi alone in his home after an attack. Let me just say that sleeping alone in a house in the middle of a forest with a creature living in it is a very, very bad idea.

Final thoughts:

Great Spanish horror movie. Creepy and unnerving. Junio Valverde who plays Santi was great. Highly recommend it.

Rating: 5 out of 5